>>>>>Just a bit of a puzzle, why would it be in the plurals. Balkan is a single peninsula, named after one single mountain, not a mountain chain.
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>>>>I thought the Balkan Peninsula got it's name from the tallest mountain, and that the Balkan region (the Balkans) is named for the Balkan Mountains which is a range.
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>>>But the peninsula and the region are the same thing, IMO. Which is why the plural is puzzling.
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>>I would say, semantically they aren't the same thing.
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>I meant that they cover the same area; more below.
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>>The Balkan Peninsula is the land mass, and the Balkans is the people, the culture, the political divisions etc. Sort of like the Iberian Peninsula is not really the same thing as Spain and Portugal (and a couple of other places). Besides isn't there more than one Balkan state? The Balkans is usually used as a short form for The Balkan States.
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>Which is probably the reason why the plural is needed in English. We say just "Balkan" (definite article is implied) and nobody really means the mountain, and very few mean the peninsula in the geographic sense. I'd actually bet that many don't even know that there's a mountain of the name (even though that's 6th grade stuff) - it's commonly used in exactly that sense, the political region. The next sense is Balkan as a state of mind, but not what you'd think. It's not a synonym for a free-for-all neighborly fight, it denotes the patriarchal, parochial mind. The geographic meaning takes a far third place.

When you say We say just "Balkan", who's the 'we' in that? I thought you were speaking English. ;)